Thirty-three percent. That’s how much time Judie McCarthy’s bookkeeping firm was spending chasing clients for information instead of doing accounting or advising on business decisions. Just sending requests, following up, and tracking down the same documents week after week.
The breaking point came on a Friday afternoon when one of Judie’s biggest clients called, furious. “The bookkeeper is harassing me for the same information over and over again,” she said, demanding a new bookkeeper. Judie talked her off the ledge that afternoon, promising to investigate Monday morning.
But when she reviewed the email thread with her team, the problem wasn’t the bookkeeper. It was the system, or rather, the lack of one. They were sending emails with multiple questions each week. Clients would respond but never answer everything, starting the cycle all over again.
When Judie called the client back to explain what she’d found, the phone went silent. “I thought, oh, she’s hung up on me,” Judie recalls. “And I realized she was crying.” The client, a high-powered woman running two businesses, wasn’t angry anymore. She was overwhelmed. “It is so hard to keep up with everything,” she said through tears.
That conversation changed everything. This wasn’t a difficult client; it was a horrible client experience and none of the existing tools were solving it.
In this episode of She Counts, hosts Nancy McClelland and Questian Telka sit down with Judie, co-founder of Client Hub, a company that notably doesn’t use titles, reflecting their values of collaboration over hierarchy. After 25 years running a successful bookkeeping practice and a previous career in automotive management, Judie built the practice management software she wished existed. And her experience offers a roadmap for any woman in accounting who’s ever thought, “There has to be a better way.”
The Problem Nobody Wanted to Name
The idea for Client Hub didn’t start with Judie at all. It came from her lead bookkeeper during a regular team meeting.
“We were always trying to be really productive, looking for ways to increase productivity and deliver better client experience,” Judie recalls. “We’re going around the room and my lead bookkeeper said our biggest challenge is getting the information we need from our clients to do the work.”
The statement hit hard. Everyone knew it was true, but hearing it said out loud changed something. Judie’s team decided to measure the problem. Their mini research study revealed that staggering 33% figure. A full third of their time was going to administrative chase-downs rather than actual accounting work.
“There are lots of great internal workflow tools on the market,” Judie explains. “But our internal workflow wasn’t the biggest challenge. It was that external workflow.”
After that crying phone call with her client, they tried to solve it together. The client suggested sending one email for everything. Judie knew that wouldn’t work. They’d just have the same conversation about too many emails. So they created a shared Google Sheet where the client could answer all questions weekly.
“That didn’t last two weeks,” Judie says. “This was when I thought there has to be a better way. And there really weren’t any good tools on the market at that time.”
From Frustrated User to Unlikely Founder
The jump from identifying a problem to building software isn’t obvious, especially for someone without recent coding experience. Judie had been a software developer in the 1980s, but as she jokes, “Code is much different now. We’re working on Windows now, not DOS systems. I couldn’t write code to save my life right now.”
What she did have was connections and a clear understanding of the problem. Through a mutual friend, she met her future business partner, an experienced product manager who wasn’t necessarily looking to build accounting software either.
“We were talking about different software projects,” Judie says. “It just came to fruition that we were really well aligned on this idea.”
For four months, they just talked. Judie created a PowerPoint presentation outlining her vision. They compared notes, did market research with their networks, asking the crucial question: “If we build it, will they buy it?”
“It probably wasn’t until six, seven, eight months in that we said, hey, let’s make this a business,” Judie recalls. “We didn’t have to do it all up front.”
When they were ready to build, fortune smiled again. Her partner found two developers looking for work. Those developers are still with Client Hub today, eight years later. That kind of team stability is almost unheard of in tech startups.
The Hardest Part: Letting Go of What You Built
For two years, Judie juggled both businesses, running her practice while building Client Hub. But eventually, something had to give.
“It finally took me about two years to really wrap my head around the idea of selling my practice,” Judie admits. The hesitation wasn’t just about steady income versus startup uncertainty. “Many of my clients had been with me for over 20 years. A lot of them were almost like family.”
Nancy and Questian immediately understood this tension. When they faced emotional paralysis making decisions about the podcast, Questian told Nancy, “We just have to think like a man.” The comment was partly joking, but it pointed to something real about how women often consider relationship impacts in business decisions.
“As women, because we’re often caretakers, relationships are so important to us,” Judie observes. “A man selling a practice probably wouldn’t think so much about that. They’re like, ‘I’m going to get rid of this practice, take the biggest payout, and go.’”
When Judie finally decided to sell, she approached it with characteristic attention to relationships. The broker’s initial ad copy was “absolutely horrendous—typical accounting, all about the numbers, nothing about what the practice was.” She rewrote it herself to attract tech-forward firms that valued client experience.
The response was overwhelming. She received 20 offers at or above asking price within 24 hours. But after interviewing several candidates, Judie chose the lowest bidder.
“Within ten minutes of the start of that conversation, I knew he was the one,” she says of the Texas firm owner who bought her practice. “Everything about the offer and the transition planning and how he ran his firm, it felt more like a family firm.”
The transition showed just how embedded Client Hub had become in her clients’ workflows. When Judie and the buyer announced the sale together via Zoom, her lead bookkeeper of eight years went quiet, then asked, “I don’t have to give up using Client Hub, do I?”
“I said, we’ve been together eight years and you’re worried about giving up your tech, not losing me?” Judie laughs. One of her clients asked the same question during their meeting.
The Surprisingly Simple Path to Building Something New
For anyone sitting on an idea, Judie offers practical and decidedly non-technical advice.
Write Everything Down Immediately
“I have a whiteboard on my desk,” Judie says. “Whenever something comes to mind, I jot it down because otherwise I’ll forget it in about five minutes.”
Questian laughed in recognition, “As soon as you walk through a doorway, it just goes poof out of my mind.”
Stop Worrying About Idea Theft
“Don’t be afraid that somebody’s going to steal your idea,” Judie emphasizes. “Chances are somebody’s not going to steal it and run. I’ve never heard of that happening.”
Instead, she encourages talking to everyone. “Firm owners reach out to me all the time saying, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Would you mind if I bounce it off you?’”
Launch Before You’re Ready
When Client Hub was approaching release, Judie kept hesitating. “It’s not ready, it’s not ready.”
Then Laura Redmond from Aero Workflow gave her the advice that changed everything: “It will never be ready.”
“Thank you, Laura,” Judie says now. She’s internalized this so deeply that she sometimes pushes her product team to release features before they feel complete. “Let’s let our customers tell us what more it needs instead of us building what we think it needs.”
You Don’t Need What You Think You Need
“People think you need investors and a marketing company to build a software company,” Judie says. “You don’t. It is a big investment because you’re going to be paying developers eventually, but just get started.”
Client Hub has grown organically, without outside funding, staying true to its original vision while evolving from a simple portal to a full practice management solution with internal workflow, file management, and integrations with QuickBooks, Xero, Anchor, and more.
Breaking Through the Real Barriers
When asked about obstacles she faced as a woman entering tech, Judie’s answer surprised even the hosts.
“I never saw barriers in anything I did,” she says. “I never walked into a room full of men and thought, ‘Oh, I’m the only woman here.’ I’m an equal.”
She credits this mindset to her mother, who passed when Judie was just 22. “She was my greatest champion. She always told me there were no limits to what I could do or who I could become.”
This outlook carried Judie through careers in automotive management, bookkeeping, and now technology—all traditionally male-dominated fields. But she’s quick to acknowledge reality. “I know a lot of women do experience barriers. I don’t want people to think I’m saying there aren’t barriers, because there are. You just need to find your way around them, just like a traffic jam.”
The tech ecosystem has been surprisingly welcoming. “I’ve never met any of my male counterparts in this profession that I didn’t feel had respect for me as an equal,” she says. “They want talent. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, black, white, Asian, gay, straight. People nowadays, especially in technology, we are just very welcoming.”
Perhaps most importantly, Judie operates from a different fear calculation than most. “I’m the kind of person who is never afraid to try because the thought of regret or what-would-have-been really scares me,” she explains. “I don’t ever want to regret that I did or did not do anything in my life.”
And through it all, she maintains perspective with humor. “I don’t know why I wasn’t voted class clown,” she jokes. “Maybe don’t take yourself so seriously. Roll with it.”
This philosophy extends to Client Hub’s company culture, from their no-titles policy to their biweekly “happy hours” where customers gather informally to network, laugh, and share feedback that shapes product development.
The Legacy of Solving Your Own Problem
Today, Client Hub is more than the simple portal Judie first envisioned. But it stays true to its original mission: helping firms get work done without friction.
“People ask us to implement something like time and billing,” Judie explains. “For us, it was the perfect opportunity to partner with somebody.” They integrated with Anchor rather than building their own billing solution. “We need to keep it simple.”
This focus means saying no to features that don’t serve the core vision, even if they might be profitable. It means listening more than talking, a skill Judie learned in automotive management training decades ago. “The most important communication skill you have is listening.”
When asked what she hopes her presence as a female tech founder represents, Judie’s answer was immediate. “I hope my presence shows the next generation that their passions, ideas, and creativity belong here.”
The message applies to any woman considering a significant professional leap. Don’t let anything or anyone hold you back—not parents, partners, or that one person who says it’s not a great idea.
Your Problem Is Someone Else’s Too
Judie’s story proves that the best solutions come from problems you live with daily. A bookkeeper frustrated by wasted time became a tech founder because she couldn’t ignore the problem anymore.
Listen to the full episode, which Nancy closed with a quote from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, developer of the first compiler for computer programming: “Humans are allergic to change. They love to say we’ve always done it this way. I try to fight that.”
Women like Judie show us we don’t have to bend ourselves around broken systems. We can build better ones instead.
Sometimes, we have to create the tools we need. So write down that idea, share it with someone, and start before you’re ready.
Join the conversation: Have you ever come up with an idea for a new app? What has prevented you from pursuing it? Or if you have pursued it, share that with us too. Follow the She Counts Podcast LinkedIn page and share your story under this episode.